


forgiving what we cannot forget

by BlackEyedGirl



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Amnesia, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-14
Updated: 2010-11-14
Packaged: 2017-10-13 10:20:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/136178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackEyedGirl/pseuds/BlackEyedGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Because there's nothing like an open wound, Eduardo sends for the deposition statements. He doesn't recognise the people in these pages.' Amnesia-fic, for a prompt response.</p>
            </blockquote>





	forgiving what we cannot forget

**Author's Note:**

> For a prompt at [mark_eduardo](http://community.livejournal.com/mark_eduardo/24101.html?thread=301349#t301349) on LJ: _One of them gets amnesia and can't remember the mess of the last years._
> 
>  **NB:** This is not intended as a realistic depiction of amnesia, or of trauma-recovery. I am still entirely willing to take feedback on these issues, but if you are likely to be triggered or upset by their inclusion, please take care in reading. Or ask me for more information ♥

The doctors say 'retrograde amnesia' and 'can't guarantee when the memories might come back' and 'no, Mr Saverin, you definitely did graduate from Harvard, you're actually finishing a doctorate in your spare time at the moment'. Eduardo, because he is Eduardo, calls Mark.

Mark stands over the hospital bed, watching Eduardo smiling uncertainly at him. Mark, because he is Mark, says, "you're not speaking to me right now. We built a multi-billion-dollar company and then I took your share. Then you sued me. That's what you missed."

 

*

Eduardo thought he was joking at first. It would have been a bad joke, but then Mark never knew the lines very well. And Mark looks mostly the same, in flip-flops and sweats, so it's easy to believe that this whole thing could just be a _really_ bad joke.

But then Mark sits down, and shows Eduardo his phone. Something called Facebook, and the year, and both of their names. Mark recites the story in a monotone and at the end Eduardo really has no choice. “Get out.”

“Eduardo.”

“No, I really think you should go.”

Mark leaves. That’s never happened before.

 

*

They let him go back to his apartment eventually. Apparently being surrounded by the familiar might help. Nothing in this place is familiar to him. Eduardo is glad there's no one else - no one who he needs to relearn, no one important who came into his life after Mark and before this. Though it is sort of sad.

They send him over the company records and accounts, and he reads the current draft of his thesis. Then, because there's nothing like an open wound, Eduardo sends for the deposition statements. He doesn't recognise the people in these pages. It's his name, and Mark's, but he can't imagine either of them saying these things.

It takes him three days to get into his email - they want confirmation of medical status before they agree to unlock the account, with the password he cannot remember. It's mostly business email, with some to his father and mother. A few recently from Chris, and a couple from Dustin. None from Mark.

But when he starts typing Mark's name, it autofills with guilty ease. Eduardo looks in drafts. Then in deleted items. There are twenty deleted drafts with Mark's name in the to box. The most recent one begins, _It was good to see you._

Eduardo opens a new email and sends: _When was the last time we spoke?_

Mark replies within three minutes. _The hospital. I thought it was *retro*grade amnesia._

 _It is, asshole. Before the hospital._

There is a longer wait this time. Fifteen minutes. Mark replies, _About a week before your accident. We ran into each other in a bar._

 _Your side or mine?_

 _Mine. You were in California, I don't know why._

 _What happened?_

 _Nothing. We said hi. That was it._

Eduardo finds that pretty unlikely, but nothing in the deleted emails gives him any more information. He turns off the computer.

*

It’s been three weeks and nothing has come back to him. Eduardo wakes up to an alarm he doesn’t recognise, convinced every time that he’s late for class. In the next moment he remembers what happened, and spends the rest of the day looking for clues.

He can’t work like this, too much that he’s lost in less than a decade of memories. Mom tries to tell him that it could be worse, that people have forgotten their whole lives. It feels like his whole life, to have missed the part where he apparently grew up and left school and lost all of his friends.

Eduardo calls Chris, remembering only belatedly that he doesn’t know if anyone has told the other guys. But Chris, thankfully, knows what happened. He says, “Eduardo. How are you?”

They talk for a little, relearning what Chris is doing (politics, apparently), if he still talks to Dustin (yes), if he’s been out to California recently. That earns a pause.

Chris says, “Mark came to see you?”

“Yeah.”

“I mean in person? He flew out there?”

“Yes. You sound surprised.”

Chris hmms. “Yeah. It’s hard to get him out of the offices. Even if he has meetings in New York, he usually just video-conferences. I guess he must-.”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

It prompts a half-formed impulse – Mark is working too hard, so Eduardo should go rescue him. Once upon a time, Eduardo knew all the tricks to convince Mark to take a break from being wired-in. There must not be anyone left to do that now.

 

*

 

After a month, Eduardo smashes everything in his apartment. Glasses he doesn’t remember buying, a television which blithely records shows he knows nothing about, and the bathroom mirror because he’s not nineteen anymore and he keeps forgetting that. It’s a teenage fit of rage but so-fucking-what? What’s the difference?

He throws the computer off the desk and suddenly he can’t breathe. Fury sweeps over him, worse for being unpredicted, and _this_ must be how it felt the first time. Desperate and terrified and betrayed. He calls Mark.

Mark picks up the middle of the second ring. “Eduardo?”

“I broke my computer.”

“…okay.”

“I think I broke yours.”

There’s a long silence. “Yeah. You did. I got a new one. I’ll send you a computer, don’t worry. It’s all right.”

“No it’s not. How could you-?” The memory comes together a little more. There’s someone else there with them. “Sean.”

“Yeah. Sean was there too. You don’t like him.”

“I know that,” Eduardo says, because he does, with biting clarity. He hates Sean, he just doesn’t know why. Eduardo hangs up the phone, and sits there in the wreckage, trying to remember the day he and Mark ended.

 

*

 

A new laptop turns up the next day, apparently designed to Mark’s exacting specifications and couriered out overnight. Eduardo sets it up after he gets the rest of the mess cleared up. When he turns it on, there is an email from his assistant, Rachel. He starts to reply, asking her to check up on a detail from one of their contracts. Eduardo blinks. He remembers the contract.

Eduardo calls the office for the first time in a week, to check that he’s not imagining things. As he’s talking to Rachel, more details filter back in. Numbers and names and none of it objectively _interesting_ but it makes him laugh. At least he can still work. At least he can still do _something_.

 

*

 

So Eduardo has some of his work data where he needs it, and he knows the worst thing that happened to him at college. He waits until it’s midnight, and he’s drunk, and he calls Mark again. “Hey.”

“Uh. Hey. Eduardo.”

“So, were you tempted to just not tell me? Or does it not actually bother you that everything’s fucked up between the two of us?”

“Wardo.”

“Why did you tell me, Mark?”

“I’m pretty sure you would have found out from someone pretty soon. It’s public knowledge that you sued me.”

“No. Why did _you_ tell me?”

Mark coughs. “I thought you might understand this time. You know, if I could explain to a you that wasn’t actually… there.”

“So instead of a six month run-up at hating you, you expected me to do all the work at once?”

“Eduardo.”

“What happened the night we met in the bar?”

Mark goes silent and, after a minute or two, hangs up the phone. Eduardo has had relationships that ended like this before, him with no idea how it all went so wrong. But this is different. He knows what happened, but he doesn’t feel it. He should hate Mark but he can’t do it properly and that, of all the fucked-up things, feels the most familiar of all.

 

*

 

Eduardo goes to work for a half-day, trying to get back into the swing of things. When he gets back to the apartment, Mark is sitting outside.

Eduardo asks, “How did you even get up the stairs?”

“I bribed the doorman. I told him I was your boyfriend.”

“Mark!”

“Yeah, I would report him. Pictures of us together in college are no guarantee that I’m not a deluded stalker.”

“Mark.”

“Can I come in?”

Eduardo opens the door and lets Mark walk past him. He says, “Two visits in two months. Must be special.”

“I used to-.”

“But not recently. Not since the lawsuit. Not since before that.” Eduardo can’t absolutely guarantee this but it feels like the truth.

“No,” Mark agrees. He sits down on Eduardo’s couch.

Eduardo looks at him. Though now it doesn’t seem unfamiliar – Mark sitting there. He hates this, second-guessing everything that happens. He wasn’t always this suspicious of his own conduct. Eduardo sits down beside Mark. He says, “You’re being nice to me. For you, I mean. Given that I’ve been calling you every other day to be mad at you. I haven’t been doing this the whole time, have I? I haven’t spent the past three years sending passive-aggressive emails and ignoring you at parties?”

Mark smiles, lopsided. “No. Scrupulously polite. For three years. Forgive me if I prefer late night drunken abuse.”

“I didn’t-” Eduardo protests, laughing without meaning to. He had remembered that Mark used to make him laugh, even with all recent evidence to the contrary.

“No,” Mark says, “Not really.”

Eduardo says, “Mark. Why did you tell me?” Mark’s right, of course. He wouldn’t have gone long without finding out from someone. But he thinks it might be nice, not to know that about the two of them. To be nineteen and stupidly in love and to sometimes allow yourself the lie that he might notice that. Or care.

Mark says, “I’m used to you hating me now. I didn’t want- it was easier that way. I didn’t think you’d want to-.”

“Okay.”

“Wardo.”

“No, I mean, it’s okay. I get it.”

“No you don’t,” Mark says. “But that’s okay. You’re still…”

Eduardo leans in. He puts his hand over Mark’s mouth. “Tell me, the thing in the bar… Tell me we haven’t done this before. Swear.”

“Done what? Eduardo…” Mark’s mouth is still open when Eduardo leans in for the kiss. He gasps, and then pushes Eduardo back, gently. “We haven’t,” he says, “I swear, Wardo, we haven’t.”

Eduardo kisses him again, starting a count he knows is accurate. One. Two. Three and then he stops. “Okay. So I didn’t forget the important part. Good to know.”

He’s forgotten the lawsuit and Facebook and leaning over the table and _You had one friend_. He remembers the first time Mark got drunk with him, and they fell asleep together on the couch. He remembers breaking the computer, and something about the rain, and that Mark will never stop finding the fucking chicken hilarious. He remembers Mark saying _I need you here_ and _Oops_ and there’s a wash of meaning that doesn’t belong, attached to all of those. His mind is trying to put the pieces together and he doesn’t know whether these are new or old connections. Mark is here now.

Eduardo says, “Stay over. There’s a spare room, stay over. Have breakfast with me tomorrow.”

 

*

Eduardo wakes up at three a.m. Mark is still asleep on the couch, though there’s a perfectly serviceable bed in the spare room. Eduardo sits on the chair opposite, and waits.

Mark opens his eyes. “Hi?”

“You said sorry.”

“What?”

“In the bar, Mark. That’s what you… I wasn’t still mad at you. You apologised.”

Mark stares at him. “Yes.”

“You didn’t think that was maybe something you should tell me?”

“I said sorry. I did. But you didn’t say anything back. You left.”

Eduardo remembers that part now too. He remembers opening up his email and trying to work out what to say. He remembers knowing.

Mark is still watching him. Eduardo says, “I was going to come back. Afterwards. I was going to come back.”

Mark says, “I thought maybe you forgot that part.”

“Yeah,” Eduardo says, “Only for a little while.”


End file.
